This site, Archatron, had its origins in my wanting to (quickly) get a blog set up for random bits of writing, thoughts, and/or other images or ephemera that wouldn’t fit other social media I have. Posts too long for Instagram (and its stubborn word limit), Facebook, and/or X (Twitter)—maybe about subjects whose nature required something more in-depth—but that I didn’t feel were necessarily right for submission anywhere else, either. (Maybe a Substack will come later. Who knows.) The word Archatron is from Cormac McCarthy’s final published literary work, Stella Maris (2022).

And here’s a bit more of the word’s backstory, and the novel it comes from: The protagonist of McCarthy’s Stella Marris is a physics prodigy named Alicia Western (who prefers to go by Alice); in the book, she’s housed at the Stella Maris psychiatric facility of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. The psych hospital constitutes the entire novel’s setting. Stella Maris is mostly comprised of dialogues between Alice and her various interlocutors,  mainly psych doctors, all relayed in transcript style. Though Alice is a mathematical and physics wunderkind she’s also the victim of a recent nervous breakdown: She’s had what might be a series of nightmarish hallucinations—or, she might have had glimpses of the dark Truth behind the architecture of our reality. In one of the visions responsible for her suicidal-psychotic break, she claims to have glimpsed an entity she calls “The Archatron”:

(The following is from page 105 of my 2022 hardback copy of Stella Maris)

ALICE: I had a sort of waking dream that was frightening to me. And then I realized that it was neither waking nor a dream. It was something else. And I had no reason to believe that what I saw did not exist and that if that realm was unknown to us that didnt [sic] make it less threatening but more. […] I saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me. […] A being. A presence. And that the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge. […] The keepers at the gate saw me and they gestured among themselves and then all of that went dark and I never saw it again. I called it the Archatron.

DR. COHEN: The presence beyond the gate.

ALICE: The presence beyond the gate.

DR. COHEN: And it was shrouded away.

ALICE: Yes.

So that’s the story behind this blog’s name.

Thanks for stopping by.

You can address correspondence, physical media, etc., to:

Archatron
PO Box 570166
Dallas, TX 75357-0166

A SASE or IRC with appropriate postage is required for response or return of materials.

—Oliver Sheppard, March 14, 2024